Mobile Friendly is the way to go!

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Photo: LinkedIn

What has previously been an industrial experience just had a serious working over. The new LinkedIn app is out on the streets. The question is, does it change the game and has Linkedin life become a bit easier?

Linkedin has released a ground up rebuild their mobile app. The idea being to develop a mobile experience that is more intuitive, smarter while simplifying the LinkedIn experience.

The streamlined new app has five core areas

Your Feed – Me – My Network – Messaging – Search.

Your Feed - (Home) is content updates from your network. Linkedin’s aim is to find the most relevant content for your industry, function, and skills along with the conversations you want to see.

For the first time, LinkedIn will ask you what content you are interested in, and if you don’t like what you see, you will be able to unfollow things.

Me - is all about your professional brand. It’s where you can see who’s viewed your profile, who is commenting on, or sharing your posts.

A real step forward is the ability to update your profile that previously has been very limited. From first appearances, the ability to add rich media to your profile is still limited in mobile apps

You can see people you may know, new posts from your network and suggestions to keep connected. These will include all the usual prompts to say congrats (why they can’t use the word congratulations I will never know!) to a connection celebrating a new job or work anniversary, or send a message to someone in your network when they have written a post.

A useful attribute comes from syncing your calendar. You’ll be pointed to look at the profile of the person you are meeting, with details on what shared connections or shared interests you have. A real warm introduction to anyone you might meet!

Messaging - breaks away from email for a more Facebook/ Whats app approach to keeping in touch. It is easy for you to ping someone in your network on a quick question or continue a conversation as you would in real-time.

Linkedin tells us that search is now 300% faster, and smarter. Their example, search for jobs with the title “Gold” and get results before you even finish typing.

LinkedIn state the following – “The new app also fully realizes our multi-app strategy by bringing more focus to the main flagship app. And with the new app launcher feature, it is incredibly seamless to launch into other LinkedIn apps for dedicated and deeper experiences, like Pulse, Groups, Job Search, etc.”

This is a big move by LinkedIn, who realise that they like others are getting increasing amounts of their traffic from mobile devices. My thoughts have leant toward the idea that LinkedIn has a clunky back end.
Early days with the new app and we will see what improvements have been made over time. The desktop version is still key, and you still need that for the full experience of Linkedin (Work sample sharing of rich media, etc.)

Who will be the winner in the great game of Live streaming?

The truth is nobody knows yet. Two spanking new apps released in the Spring of 2015, are showing all the signs of being a Betamax v VHS or Apple v PC battle for supremacy.

For those that don’t know, they are both live streaming apps that work on IOS and Android. The App’s give anybody with a phone or tablet device (along with access to the internet), the opportunity to broadcast LIVE to the world from where ever they are.

My first hint of the existence of these systems came at the opening speech of Social Media Marketing world 2015 in San Diego. Mike Stelzner spoke about Meerkat in his Keynote, little realising that Periscope (A Twitter Supported App) was being released to the world as he spoke.

In the weeks since San Diego, I have been operating both apps, looking for the angle to make the systems work for my business. Shiny new apps tend to take their time to develop. It was pointless to choose between the two, so I went with both to see what happened.

Here are my reflections on both systems along with what would be nice to see coming down the tracks.

Review

Meerkat

Meerkat came first, and so gets first slot.

Meerkat is a downloadable app that streams live to the internet from your phone or tablet. Meerkat links to your Twitter account and notifies all your Twitter followers the moment you hit the stream button.

As soon as you start streaming, followers can see your broadcast, retweeting to others if they like what they see. The top of the screen shares the location of the stream and the twitter ID of the broadcaster.

Below that you see (hopefully many) icons that indicate the Twitter followers who are watching the broadcast. Numbers can be into the hundreds. (I don’t know if there is a limit.) You can also see the title of the stream including the hashtag

Meerkat is very easy to use once you link up your Twitter account. The single page interface asks you to title your stream and has a button marked “Schedule” and another marked “Stream”.

The schedule button allows you to “forward plan” a stream and alert your followers to the upcoming broadcast. It will send you a reminder nearer the time and can schedule 24 hours ahead.

Hit the stream button and you are live!. It can sometimes feel funny talking to no one at the start of the process, but talk you must.

In a few seconds, you start to see the icons of those who are watching. They can comment like and re-tweet your broadcast. They are also free to come and go, so you better make it interesting

When you finish your broadcast, it’s gone, Vamoose! Never to be seen again, at least on Meerkat.

Meerkat does not support the storage of your stream, but it does give the opportunity to overload the storage on your iPhone by saving the stream to your phone library. Being a video, you can expect this to take up Gigabyte chunks of your memory banks!

One thing Meerkat does that Periscope doesn’t, is to let you connect to a Facebook Fan page. A big + tick for that!

Periscope.

Periscope is (marginally) my favoured system as things stand. A couple of extra features influence my thinking.

Periscope does pretty much the same job as Meerkat. It allows for onscreen comments, re-tweet capability and also lets a viewer tap the screen, creating hearts that float up the screen. The hearts tell the broadcaster you like their stuff!

Where Periscope wins out is at the end of the stream.

When your stream finishes, it does not disappear. Periscope keep things live for replay over the next 24 hours, allowing people to view your video during that time.

The second reason to like Periscope is the data it gives you after the stream finishes, including viewers Twitter ID. Periscope tells you who is watching on mobile or via a desktop. You can connect with them and follow as needed. To my knowledge, Meerkat does not do this.

The Split Test

On first look at both apps, you see a lot of sunset, cats up trees along with people walking and talking about not very much. I wanted to find a way to provide something useful that people could engage & enable them to respond.

So started @linkedinadviser on Twitter.

The aim is to see how long it take to build a community using one or both of these platforms and find out which one works best for this purpose. Three days in and the Twitter following is starting to grow with no other marketing on any other channel.

I am working on combining my saved streams and getting them on to Youtube. It seems an awful waste just to let them go without making the most of the content. The challenge here is how to make a portrait view look good on youtube.

Watch this space for that one!

Meerkat has a suppurating app in Meerkatch that automatically can do this for you in a very basic kind of auto-posting way.

Future developments we would like to see!

Let’s be clear up front. These are very new systems that are constantly under development. More data on followers would be welcome, especially on Meerkat

More Metrics and measurable data

The ability to notify more than one Twitter account and for Periscope to be able to link to Facebook Pages would be a great move.

All things said and done; there is an opportunity for marketers on these platforms. As ever, the challenge comes in finding a useful way to use the systems that meet the needs & challenges of your client market.

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